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Through Joe Gillis, the main character of Sunset Boulevard, Wilder creates a narrator who clashes between words and images. As Katelin Trowbridge in “The War between Words and Images—Sunset Boulevard” claims, Joe Gillis “writes screenplays. His tendency to disparage images reveals his conviction that they undermine the authenticity of words.” On the other hand Norma Desmond “despises words, which she insists, have vitiated the purity of visual imagery in the film medium.” In other words, Trowbridge contends that the juxtaposition of Joe and Norma creates a battle between a character that has a love of words and one that has a love of images.
Since Sunset Boulevard deals with a star’s transition from silent to sound films it creates an interesting collaboration of writing and visuals. As Trowbridge argues, throughout the film, Gillis tries to clean up the screenplay he is working on with Norma, adding in more dialogue and fearing that images will take away from the power of what he has written. As the narrator, Joe tries to put words to the visual images he so despises and as Trowbridge believes his narration shows his “incompatibility with the film medium.” He is a character who prefers to write instead of create visuals thus never succeeding in the Hollywood environment.
On the other hand, at the complete opposite end of the spectrum as Trowbridge argues, is Norma Desmond. She was an actress during the days that Hollywood used little to no words and prefers to live in a visual world. As Trowbridge contends the film “dramatizes Norma Desmond’s desire to replace reality with visual signs.” In other words, she tries to create a world in which she is visually the center of (noted by the amount of pictures she has of herself around the house). Trowbridge goes on to mention many other instances in which the two main characters clash through their opposing beliefs on words and images. Furthermore, she makes an interesting case that it is the union of words and images in the film that leads to Norma’s madness.
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tagged Billy_Wilder Images Images_vs_Words Sunset_Boulevard Words by levenson ...on 29-NOV-05
tagged Billy_Wilder Images Images_vs_Words Sunset_Boulevard Words by levenson ...on 29-NOV-05